


these, our bodies, possessed by light

by void_fish



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Non-Permanent Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-10-31 07:36:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10894725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/void_fish/pseuds/void_fish
Summary: In another life, Zach had a spear.It was made of bamboo, hollow and lightweight. He filled it with salt, sage, iron, carved runes up and down it. He killed monsters with the spear. Demons.And, at the very end, Josh.





	these, our bodies, possessed by light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aperfect20 (blamefincham)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blamefincham/gifts).



> for lily!
> 
> you asked for magic realism and-- you got this. which is almost magic realism. anyway, i hope you like it!
> 
> (thanks to R, S, C and PB for reading it over and being amazingly helpful when i was totally stuck, you guys are the real heroes here)
> 
> For more information on the character death tag, spoilers in the end notes

In another life, Zach had a spear.

It was made of bamboo, hollow and lightweight. He filled it with salt, sage, iron, carved runes up and down it. He killed monsters with the spear. Demons.

And, at the very end, Josh.

-

Hockey sticks are hollow, but they weren’t always. Zach remembers.

He used to have to burn the strongest sigil he knew onto the blade of his stick. There’s a hockey store in Toronto that sells stick tape infused with silver wool. If you ask the right person.

New sticks aren’t made of wood any more. He can fill them with herbs and rock salt. It sounds a little like a rainmaker, and he has to strengthen it with runes up and down the shaft, but it works.

He hits the ice at Nationwide for the very first time and hears the hiss of melting ice as he cuts through it.

(But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, here.

Stories begin at the beginning, after all.)

-

It begins in Cleveland, on a bus leaving the city.

Zach has the window seat. Josh is fast asleep next to him, snoring on his shoulder.

It’s raining, and Zach pillows his head against the hood of his sweatshirt and settles down to sleep.

He dreams.

-

Like so many of his dreams, it starts and ends with blood. 

Some of it is his. There is a large scrape down his chest, through the woad painted there. He grips his spear a little tighter and reaches up to the leather thong around his neck, where a heavy iron pendant rests.

There is screaming. There is dying.

There is a boy with dark hair and darker eyes. Zach thinks he might be the prince.

There is a monster, just like in all the best stories.

-

Zach wakes up in Indiana with drool on his chin and his heartbeat in his ears. He checks his palms for scars.

-

There is a monster in Nationwide Arena, just below center ice.

Zach knows this like he knows skating. Like he knows the protective runes tattooed around his wrist like a rosary.

He can see it tangling with the team’s skates, leeching into the steel blades, the leather, the laces. It clings even off the ice, blending in with the black rubber flooring.

It’s only preseason and he can already feel it sinking its claws into the other new guys, the kids who don’t know what he does.

But the veterans, the ones who’ve been there too long, Zach looks at them and his hands ache with sympathy, because it’s in their _bones_ , their muscles. He watches the way Foligno carries himself, like he’s carrying fifty extra pounds on his shoulders.

(He watches Foligno brushing his hand over the C on his jersey and the monster rears its head, bleeding into Foligno’s heart.

He watches Bobrovsky stretch and watches the monster stretch with him, wrapped tightly around his joints.)

-

‘Dude,’ Josh says, grabbing his wrist. ‘Where are you _going_?’

Zach blinks. ‘The rink?’

‘It’s this way,’ Josh says, slowly. He’s looking at Zach like he has some sort of brain injury.

It’s only preseason, Zach’s been there less than a week, and he’s already nauseous with how the monster is in the very heartbeat of the building. He can feel it in the whole city, when he’s walking to and from the arena and the hotel. The sidewalks are trying to drag him away from the Arena District. If he stops paying attention, he finds himself avoiding Nationwide Boulevard automatically, has to force himself there.

‘Are you okay?’ Josh asks. ‘You didn’t eat a lot this morning, are you getting sick?’

Zach’s stomach is uneasy, has been since the plane touched down. He’s been forcing himself to eat, but he couldn’t do it this morning. It’s their first preseason game tonight, and-- he doesn’t want to think about what the monster will be like, with so many people in the building to feed off of.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. It even sounds convincing, but Josh is still looking at him.

-

Zach is eighteen years old.

Zach is eight hundred years old.

They all kind of blend together at a certain point.

-

Zach has a birthmark on his hip, livid red and in the shape of a hourglass. It’s about the size of a nickel.

Dylan presses a kiss to it one late spring night at Michigan, when Zach’s sweatpants are hanging off of his hips and it’s too hot to do anything but jerk each other off lazily.

‘Cool birthmark,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.’

‘You were probably distracted,’ Zach says, and hooks his fingers in his sweatpants, pushing them down his thighs to free his cock.

-

Almost every rink has a monster.

Zach meets the one at the Joe when he is eight years old.

He’s playing some kind of peewee hockey tournament, and he gets lost looking for the bathroom.

The monster at the Joe is ancient and it wraps around Zach like fog.

_What are you?_ the monster asks.

‘I’m a hockey player,’ Zach says. The monster is wrapped around his chest like ropes, like it’s trying to suffocate him.

_No_ , the monster says. _You are more than that._

-

Zach meets Josh at a hotel in Chicago. He has one of the players Zach doesn’t recognise yet in a headlock, is ruffling his hair and laughing, loud. Zach takes his plate to a table and eats quietly, on his own.

Technically, he’s met Josh before, in every sense of the word. He met him at practice, shook his hand, looked him in the eye and felt his gut turn to water. There was nothing like recognition in Josh’s eyes, but Zach knows him like he knows breathing.

The chair next to him screeches, making him jump as Josh drops next to him heavily.

‘Hey, Z,’ he says, easily, digging into his food. ‘Eating on your own’s not cool, man.’

Zach hums, takes a bite of his eggs. ‘I’m not alone,’ he says. ‘You’re sitting right next to me.’

Josh laughs again, and they fall into easy conversation. Zach’s expression doesn’t betray the one-sided familiarity. He’s always had a good poker face.

-

The steels in Zach’s skates are blessed by a  Cailleach . He has to drive back up to Cleveland every time he gets new steels, gets her to bless them in bulk at her shop in Rocky Ridge, but. He’d rather have them than not.

He hits the ice at Nationwide and leaves faint trails of steam behind him as he cuts through the surface layer of water

He pauses at center ice and goes to one knee, pretends to check the fit of his shinpad, but he shrugs off a glove and presses his palm to the logo. He closes his eyes and feels out the shape of the monster. When he opens his eyes again, he can see it in the ice, in the stands, in the fucking _rafters_.

It’s not old, not even ten years, but it’s dark, and it’s everywhere, in the very bones of the building. It makes his ribs hurt when he breathes.

_Hello, little wolf_ , the monster says to him. The words slices through him like hot metal. He can feel it in his gut.

‘You’re not welcome here,’ Zach says, barely above a whisper. ‘I’m older than you. I’m stronger than you.’

The monster laughs. The lights above the ice flicker. There is a murmur among the rest of the players. Zach is vaguely aware of how it must look.

_You will not be the first to try and stop me, little wolf_ , the monster says.

‘Maybe not,’ Zach says, taking his hand off the ice and returning it to his glove. ‘I’ll be the first to succeed, though.’

-

Zach dreams of thunder, of lightning. Of slip-sliding through mud on a battlefield, of the crunch of rocks in his palms and knees from where he fell.

Zach dreams of someone whose face he cannot see.

Zach dreams of bright red splashes of blood being washed away in the rain.

Zach wakes up sweating. In the next bed, Josh snores gently. Outside, it’s raining. He lies there and watches the rain fall and tries to slow his breathing.

-

Zach wears a leather bracelet on his right wrist. It is woven with spells and iron chain links. It jingles when he walks.

‘Where’d you get that?’ Josh asks him one day. 

Zach is eating cereal standing over the sink in a tank top and some shorts he’s pretty sure he stole from Dylan. They have a yellow M on the leg, anyway.

‘I don’t remember,’ Zach says, honestly. ‘I’ve just always had it.’

Josh hums. He’s clinging to a coffee mug like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. ‘It’s cool,’ he says.

-

Zach lifts the Cup and feels like he can fly.

The Q doesn’t have a monster, but it has a soul, like all buildings do, and Zach can hear her singing.

_Thank you_ , she says to him, as he takes his lap of the ice.

-

Zach takes a puck to the foot and feels the bone break.

He hears the monster laugh as he staggers off the ice, falls to one knee.

The NHL’s official position on magic is that it doesn’t exist. Unofficially, there’s a practitioner on the Blue Jackets medical staff.

‘Broken?’ she asks Zach, helping him onto the table.

Zach nods, grey-faced. ‘Don’t take my skate off,’ he says. ‘I won’t be able to get it back on.’

Dr Reynolds gives him a look, and puts the palm of her hand over his skate, where the leather is _dented_. It feels like his foot has caved in. He bites his lip and fists his hands by his sides.

‘It’s a clean break,’ she says. ‘An easy fix.’

Zach nods. She takes his sock off, his shinpad, rolls his underarmour up so she can reach bare skin, and his foot goes ice cold and numb. He can /feel/ the bones rearranging, grinding against one another. He’s covered in a sheen of sweat by the time she’s done.

‘You’re good,’ she says, rolling his underarmour back down.

‘Can I play?’ he asks, rotating his foot. She rolls her eyes and nods, so he goes back to the bench. It takes him three shifts before the icy feeling wears off and he can actually feel his foot.

‘It’s seriously not broken?’ Josh asks him, during a TV timeout.

‘Nope,’ Zach says, doing a twirl on the ice to prove it.

‘You must have bones of steel,’ he says, sounding impressed.

‘Something like that,’ Zach says.

-

Zach dreams of death more often now he’s living in Columbus.

He lies in his bed , just a few blocks down from the arena, and he can hear the monster rumbling. He hangs charms in every doorway, paints sigils in salt water on the windows, but it still sneaks in on the soles of Josh’s shoes, clinging to the cuffs of his shirts or the bottom of his gear bag.

‘You’re not welcome here,’ he says, late at night.

In the next room over, he can hear Josh snoring.

-

He makes the team out of training camp, gets paired with Seth. He likes Seth, who is tall and friendly and maybe a little bit magic, Zach thinks.

(Everyone who plays hockey is probably a little bit magic, Zach has learned, just some are more than others.)

On opening night, they stand in a circle around center ice. The monster swirls around them. Zach can feel it in his chest cavity. Saader shifts from foot to foot, uneasy.

They lose. Zach skates off the ice and feels the building settle, satisfied. It got what it wanted.

There is a pulsing dark light over every player’s heart.

-

The first time Zach recognises Josh in his dreams, he’s killing him. 

His blood is staining the rocks, the mud, the tree roots. Zach’s hands, where he’s tried to hold the blood at bay. 

“Please,” Josh says, blood bubbling on his lips. “Please.”

Zach has never missed with his spear. He doesn’t miss now. 

-

Zach kisses him in a hotel room in downtown Washington.

The loss is buzzing over his skin, like the monster can reach him all the way from Columbus.

Josh is angry in the way that hockey players get when they’re bone tired, when they have nothing left to give. They’re lying on the same bed, watching Game of Thrones on Zach’s tablet. Someone gets gored through with a spear, and Zach has to fight the nausea, suddenly.

He must make a noise, because suddenly Josh is looking at him. There are dark circles under his eyes. There are dark circles under everyone’s eyes right now. Zach knows his own body aches.

‘I’m fine,’ he says, and clears his throat. The next scene is a gratuitous tit-shot. He can deal with that.

He falls asleep in Josh’s bed, with Josh’s arm wrapped gently around his shoulders. He wakes up to the closing credits of the show, and Josh looking down at him carefully, softly.

Zach kisses him before he can tell himself not to. Josh’s lips are chapped, dry, warm.

(Familiar, like his scent, like the way his hair curls when they get caught in the rain, like his silhouette in the dark.)

‘Oh,’ Josh says, quietly, against his lips. He doesn’t pull away.

Zach puts his hand on Josh’s hip, where his shirt has ridden up, and touches bare skin. ‘Please,’ he whispers.

‘Yes,’ Josh says. ‘I-- yes.’

-

Zach remembers the old country.

He remembers the rolling green hills. He remembers the old Gods.

He remembers his mother, Brighid. When he is sixteen (for the first time), she gives him a spear made of oak and teaches him a rune of protection to carve into the shaft.

When he is eighteen, he meets Joshua.

Joshua is big, broad chested, and has gently curling dark hair that falls into his eyes unless he ties it back. When the monsters come, when everyone else flees, he stands tall beside Zach.

He fights beside Zach.

He dies beside Zach.

Zach kneels, with Joshua’s head in his lap, and calls for his mother so loudly his voice breaks and cracks.

Brighid presses a knife into his hand with solemn eyes.

_If he dies by your hand, he will live again_ , she says. _He is your champion._

There is blood bubbling on Joshua’s lips.

Zach buries the knife in his chest with a shaking hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, pressing a bloody kiss to his forehead.

-

The monster wants Josh. Zach can tell by the way it purrs when he steps on the ice.

He sprains his knee and the monster breathes in deeply, like it’s scenting him.

On an off day, Zach takes an iron ring to center ice, places it there and burns a cloth bag of sage and salt and graveyard soil, murmurs in the old language.

‘Leave him alone,’ he says. ‘He’s not yours to play with.’

 _Oh, little wolf_ , the monster says. _I take whatever I please._

‘Not him,’ he says, rubbing the ashes into the logo. His hand is burning, but he just sets his jaw. ‘You don’t hurt him again.’

The building laughs, but Zach feels the pulse of the ice get stronger, just for a few beats. It grows impossibly cold, and the ash melts into nothing under the surface of the ice.

Josh heals. The team wins. Zach sleeps heavily that night, with Josh’s hand wrapped firmly around his tattooed wrist.

-

Zach can feel the monster’s grip weakening with every win they string together. They hit ten in a row and the building cries out. In the locker room, the lights flicker. Zach can see its grip on Fligs weakening. It’s not wrapped quite so tightly around his chest any more. He’s breathing a little easier every time he steps on the ice.

Bob is playing like he’s never even been touched by it. Zach can’t believe just how forcefully he threw off the monster’s grasp. It tries every time they step onto the ice, when Bob kneels down to stretch the monster reaches up through the ice and can’t find purchase, slipping off his pads, his glove, his mask like oil on water.

-

They come home from a roadtrip and Zach goes to center ice. The monster is still there, still angry, but it has no power against Zach, not any more.

‘I’m winning,’ he says, looking up into the rafters. ‘They don’t belong to you any more.’

_Little wolf_ , the monster whispers. _They will always belong to me. You have won nothing._

Zach reaches under his shirt for the ring he wears on a chain and places it at center ice again. The monster recoils.

‘You’re losing your grip.’ Zach says. ‘I can feel it. They can feel it. Give up.’

_Never_ , the monster hisses, and all the lights go out, leaving him in the darkness. The ring has melted a hole all the way through the ice, and he struggles to pull it out.

He turns to leave and sees Josh standing on the bench. Even in the gloom, he can see his eyes, wide with confusion and-- maybe a little fear.

Zach’s chest tightens. He walks towards him, expecting him to run, but. He stays where he is.

‘Josh--’

‘What are you?’ Josh half-whispers.

‘I’m--’ he stops. ‘Can we go home? I’ll tell you everything, but not here. It’s listening.’

Slow laughter follows them out of the building. The hairs on the back of Zach’s neck stand up, and he reaches for Josh’s hand without thinking. Josh goes still, but squeezes back. That much hasn’t changed, at least.

-

Sex with Josh is fun.

Josh is ticklish along his ribs, and Zach likes to press kisses along them to make him squirm.

It makes him feel like a teenager-- like a real teenager, not someone in the body of one.

It makes him feel like he’s back in his first life, when Joshua, with the sun-dark skin and the gently curling hair, would kiss him in the spring light, the dew-damp fields, would smear the woad on his skin after a battle with big hands. It was about survival, back then, was always frantic and a little desperate, life-affirming. Joshua would kiss him as if he was trying to say, ‘I’m here. You’re here. We both made it.’

It’s lazier, in Columbus. They have time. They are both spattered with bruises like splatters of paint, but they’re not dying, either of them. Zach knows better than most that hockey is not a war. Is not a battle. Zach can take the time to open Josh up underneath him, can bite at his hipbone carefully. Can swallow him down in the early morning light before either of their alarms has gone off and make him beg.

They have time.

-

Josh makes him tea, and they sit on the couch in dim light. It started raining on the way home, and his hair is curling damply into his eyes even as he tries to push it back. He has Zach’s feet in his lap and he’s rubbing one of them-- the one he broke-- absent-mindedly.

‘I’m--’ he pauses. ‘This is going to sound like I’m on drugs.’

Josh says nothing, just digs his thumb into the ball of Zach’s foot.

‘I’m a demi-god,’ he says. Josh’s hands still. ‘I fight monsters. Have done for almost a thousand years.’

‘And-- at Nationwide. That’s-- what you’re doing?’ Josh asks.

‘There’s been a monster there almost as long as I-- this body-- has been alive. It’s as old as the building itself.’

‘You’re-- immortal?’ Josh asks. His hands have started moving again, dragging down the sole of his foot.

‘I get reborn every time I die,’ he says, and then pauses. Weighs his options. ‘So do you.’

Josh looks up at him for the first time since sitting down.

Zach thinks about taking it back for a split-second, but it’s too late.

‘You have dreams, right? You’re in a field, you’re holding a dagger made of strange black stone. I’m there. You’re fighting-- something you can only ever see out of the corner of your eye until it’s almost too late. They probably started when we met in Cleveland.’

Zach wishes he could read the expression on Josh’s face.

‘They’re not dreams, are they?’ Josh asks, eventually.

Zach shakes his head.

‘I die in them,’ Josh says. ‘You-- kill me.’

‘I had to,’ Zach says. ‘Have to. You won’t come back if you die by someone else’s hand.’

Josh takes a shaky breath. ‘Tell me more,’ he says. ‘Tell me-- everything.’

Outside, lightning flashes.

-

Zach likes Coach Tortorella immediately. The monster snakes into his skates when he takes the ice for the first time at training camp, and immediately gets flung back, hissing.

He’s human, Zach knows, but. He wears a strange symbol on a chain around his neck, and the monster can’t seem to touch him. 

He looks at Zach like he knows exactly what he is.

‘You’re a good kid,’ Torts tells him in a meeting just before the start of preseason. ‘You’re going to do great things here, I can tell.’

Zach rubs the tattoo around his wrist. ‘I’m going to try,’ he says.

Torts shakes his head. ‘No. You’re going to do.’

-

They make the playoffs in New Jersey.

In Columbus, in an empty building, there is a sound like a boulder breaking in half that echoes throughout the building.

It’s over.

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers: josh dies multiple times and is reincarnated. he ends the fic alive, happy and healthy.


End file.
